Craven Arms

1920-48

I

Reverend Powell came late to the cloth, but it was the making of him. Marriage and family came even later, like a thorny old rosebush suddenly flowering in the autumn.

You would not think that a career spent in retail – haberdashery – would lead to a more philosophical way of life, but the man from behind the counter wary of emotion and its partner, inner turmoil, became a Congregational minister who could confidently stand at a lectern giving lessons in morality to his flock.

A belief that there must be more to existence on earth than commerce, and an even firmer trust in the power of thought, helped him choose to change his occupation.

Leaving the family firm was a wrench, but mainly for his father and brother, who resented him leaving almost as much as being previously irritated by him working with them, taking a wage and share of profits.

He grew tired of his family’s only measurement of success being the accumulation of material possessions and he started to worry more about who he was than what he had.

Everyone had counselled against him going into the Church, telling him he’d regret it and would miss his old way of life more than he realised. He stuck to his guns and used his modest savings to finance his way through theological college, comforted by his wide reading that shone a light on the human condition. A frugal student, he prepared himself to be able to live on a meagre stipend. He rarely socialised, to save both money, and himself from temptation.

Throughout his divinity course, he tried to be honest with himself whilst searching for a meaning and looking for an answer. In darker, reflective moments, he often questioned his belief in God. He was ‘saved’ by discovering the writings of Blaise Pascal and Søren Kierkegaard. From the former he took some solace that belief is rational because, the thinking went, if you believe in God and are right, the gains are infinite, whereas if you believe in God and are wrong, the losses are finite. Then why not believe?

From Kierkegaard, he gained confidence in his own ability to exercise choice when making decisions and he realised that the way to overcome the anxiety caused by religious doubt was to take a leap of faith into God’s arms. Becoming a man of the cloth was a direct result of freedom of choice and how he exercised it.

Every week at college he deliberately practised fashioning his essays as if writing a weekly sermon. For each he picked a theme to hammer home a message, largely to himself. From Martha Washington’s quote, ‘The greater part of our happiness…depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances,’ he deduced we each can shape our own contentment and choose how our success and happiness is defined.

That made a good sermon and a not unreasonable essay. Ideally, it needed saying out loud to get the best out of it. Written down it did not come across as academic enough.

By this method of crafting and voicing, he honed his oratorical style, later to be the making of his reputation as a scholarly Congregational minister of some distinction.

His peculiar notion of planning for his life after college saw him write what became his most regularly delivered sermons, offered on a rotational basis for the next thirty years. What a blessing that preparation turned out to be, especially when other intrusions claimed his time.

The sermon ‘On Suffering’ and the one ‘On Choice’ were personal favourites that he knew, more or less, off by heart. A bit long at fifty-five minutes, perhaps, but by God, they were good.

When he wobbled in his studies and his ministry, Milton’s great poem, Paradise Lost, came to his rescue again and again, each time strengthening his belief in his own power to be able to choose how he responded to what life threw at him. The resulting essay’s theme was:

‘The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.’

When writing that particular sermon, which is what it was, the process demanded that he declaim it. This he did as if he was speaking at the Central Hall, Westminster, and study doors were flung open along his corridor with shouts of, ‘Keep the noise down, Powell, you’ll waken the dead.’

If asked, he said that the one tenet that he took with him from his theological study, and which comforted him for ever more, would have to be ‘one must work out one’s own salvation’, a genuflection to Philippians 2:12-13, and a credo that he applied to everyone who brought him their problems.

He embraced his first ministry in a small hamlet above Hay-on-Wye. The country air, the beautiful hills and the loyal congregation together nurtured a good man highly regarded for his caring and inspiring leadership within the community.

Marrying Alice, the innocent young harmonium player and Sunday school teacher at his first chapel, raised a few eyebrows and caused a few malicious whispers from the single ladies of the congregation, but it soon gave him the family he craved.

However, try as he might, he found its demands to be entirely at odds with his inner need to focus on his work, driven as he was with an urgent sense of time running out.

II

Josephine Powell, the daughter of the manse, grew up largely in the Shropshire countryside where the Reverend Powell was invited to take over three Congregational chapels, each within an ‘easy bicycle ride of each other’, as he was, not entirely honestly, told.

Both the backwater village of their new home and the surrounding hills served to supplement Josephine’s schooling. Her daily ‘people bath’ – as her father called it – of meeting the locals, taught her the social skills of dealing with the troubled, tormented and strange.  Nature itself gave her an encyclopaedic knowledge of wild flowers and the changing seasons provided balm for her soul.

Hardly surprisingly, poetry was the love of her life, reading and writing it, studying and memorising it, reciting it in the fields and woods for fun and thinking of quotes as a comfort when troubled.

Her father shared his view of life with her on numerous occasions, in addition to  those offered in her weekly dose of his sermons. She knew many of them off by heart, almost better, word for word, than the Reverend himself.

Knowing all about Kierkegaard’s studies of ‘either/or’ choices and of freedom, she confronted dilemmas head on.

When she wrote home from university that she had accepted a marriage proposal, her parents respected her decision and her father was honoured to be asked to officiate at the wedding ceremony.

III

The big day arrived and as he settled down to his boiled egg, Reverend Powell heard his daughter gallop down the stairs and rush past him to run out of the house into the back yard.

His wife followed behind and bustled into the kitchen.

The explanation was disturbing. More than an attack of cold feet, his daughter did not want to marry the groom.

She couldn’t face being married to a research scientist who was her opposite in every respect. It was a terrible mistake and she couldn’t go through with it.

He knew this required careful handling. Finishing his breakfast, slowly, before finally responding to his agitated wife’s demands that he ‘do something’, he went outside to find his daughter.

IV

Josephine was calm when her father caught up with her. She knew what he would say and he duly said it.

The gist of it was that she had to ‘choose to choose’. There was no right or wrong decision.

Either/or has its merits.

A leap of faith is sometimes the only way.

V

As the vows were being exchanged, Josephine paused. Was she doing what was correct or what was best?

Her father’s beliefs made it possible to live with the choice you made, but they didn’t help you to make the right one…